FIFTH WORLD TRAVELLER
One day, Sameshape & Othershape rowed their boat to the center of the
lake. A single lotus bloomed – it must be a magic lotus. Open petals.
Skylight. They circled it, trying to memorize its curves, running
their hands in the air around the light. Long exposure camera. Minute
and a half. Click sky blur boat click blur shapes. Vertical &
horizontal. Background & foreground. Inner & outer. Income &
expenditure. Elemental & artificial. Candles & cellophane. Water &
film. Scalp & wheel. First & second & third. The lotus’ reverie was
interrupted by a vision. The lotus had not long been a camera, but it
was not offended at all if some still saw it
As lotus. It remembered its early experiences with color. How it first
learned to adjust its lenses. An inward gaze of total concentration.
The first time it managed to shrink its focus until everything looked
small and sharp and precise. Dissolved. Yet it did not like thinking
of the past. When it did so, something
Severe rose within it, a memory of sorts, slender and stony, of a
refusal that had squealed and refused to go away but time changed it
till it shuffled and shamefully melted away, no resistance at all,
into something mucky, this self that was not compact nor instant
digital SLR TLR – not even
Pinhole – this self more properly a plant, botanically Nelumbo
nucifera, symbolically taintless, and the payoff of the identity it
had acquiesced to was nothing more than that it was now easy to be a
camera. The photojournalist who had first called the lotus a camera
continued to think that everything was as it always was. Sameshape &
Othershape reminisced, self-absorbed
Like a flower.
MORE WORK BY MONICA MODY
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LIES/ISLE
horseless review
Danse Macabre
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